


A Family

by Jaela



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Mary Poppins (1964)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:34:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaela/pseuds/Jaela
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Time War, Mary finds her <em>own</em> means of travelling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afterism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/gifts).



> Hey there, reader! Thanks for the awesome prompt, first of all. I love the idea of Time Lady!Mary. Second, a hesitant apology -- my mind sort of took off with this in a direction I didn’t expect it to. I read the bit in your Dear Author letter about liking the idea of Mary being Twelve, and I thought, “Well, if she’s a regeneration of anyone, it’s probably not the Doctor; it’d be Romana.” And that’s where I ended up going. My apologies if you’re not a Classic!Who fan and/or aren’t familiar with Romana. I took into account that this might be the case and tried to write it to be as self-explanatory as possible. Also, because Mary is Romana here, there are some mentions of her travelling with the Doctor. But I did make an effort to leave most of the focus on her and not him, as per your request.  
> Additionally, this ended up being very much rambling about how Mary operates as a Time Lady and less about actual plot. If you like that sort of thing, awesome! If not, take comfort in this: I'm actually pretty attached to the idea of Romana-Mary, so I will likely be writing more in this universe! I'd love it if you'd read future installments, too. =']  
> Anyway, that's enough out of me! Hope you enjoy!

Travel by sky, to Mary’s mind, was far preferable to travel by the standard instant or semi-instant dimensional capsule. Disappearing _here_ and reappearing _over there_ was all well and good, but there was no _journey._ That sort of travel was hardly travel at all! It was a lazy and hasty thing, and when she began to travel alone, she determined it to be the first thing that would have to go.

An age of poring over technical texts and instruction manuals later, she went to work redesigning a vessel for Artron energy. The matrix could be much smaller as she planned for the manual steering to be done externally. The deconstruction took a long time and ultimately left her with less of a capsule and more of a device in two parts -- an external control ( with a tweaked form of chameleon circuit of her own devising intact) and a mobile storage compartment (dimensionally trancendental, in the form of a ladies’ bag -- carpet, because she liked the style). The sonic tool, such as it was, underwent a complete redesign so as to be less intrusive. There was really little need for forcing one’s way in through doors or surreptitiously invading anyone's privacy by scanning from a distance. Any calculations that needed to be made could be taken directly and politely from a close range. A sonic tape measure, then, that would do. All the unnecessary flashy bits taken out, and only the essentials left in.

But it raised questions, it did. If Time Lords (and Time Ladies, thank-you-very-much!) for all of history had travelled in capsules and carried flashing, buzzing instruments, and it took one top-scoring Academy scholar to improve on _that,_ then who was to say what else might not be improved upon? After all, if one could manipulate time and space to begin with, there could be _countless_ possibilities that had never been explored. Unfathomable, really.

The first test run was on a child in a park, on Earth. The Doctor had always loved Earth, and Mary had caught some sort of fondness for it (and for humans) from him like a pesky cold. Such things happen when a body travels with the Doctor; it really can’t be helped. At times she even missed that silly little nickname he’d given her: _Romana_ \-- certainly she’d never imagine going by anything so dreadful now, but the thought of it brought a smile to her face in spite of her better sensibilities. Mary wondered if ever _she_ would be quite so infectious.

But to the point, the first endeavour in advanced manipulations of time and space: It was a crisp autumn morning, and a girl of about ten, with inky black curls tied back in a ribbon, neat as you please, happened to be watching leaves fall from a grand old tree when Mary was brought to land nearby. The girl was a sullen child, mouth turned down at the corners, and children never look pleasant when they sulk. So Mary resolved to give her a bit of a show, and let the leaves drift _up_ from the tree instead of down. And oh, the way that girl gaped! Most improper, but better than the frowning, at least.

“Is it magic?” she asked Mary.

And Mary was quick to say she hadn’t a clue what the silly girl could be talking about.

But it wasn’t magic, of course not. There isn’t any such thing. Magic implies a supernatural force, and Mary’s methods were _quite_ natural. It was only a matter of knowing which parts of the natural world to move round without making a mess of things. Nothing simpler, once one got the hang of it.

Had it been the Doctor, he might have taken the girl who believed in magic along. He might have shown her what extraordinary things can happen _without_ magic, and how glorious and fascinating the universe is all on its own. But Mary was not the Doctor, and she no more believed in pulling bystanders out of their lives than she did bursting through doors uninvited.

A good way to be invited to test one’s skills in the form of a useful service, Mary came to find, was to read advertisements. It just so happened that every now and then the advertisements which were never published were both the most important and the least likely to attract competition. Not that anyone was _really_ competition for her. It was just so much hassle to prove it before setting to work.

Work was an interesting matter now. With the rest of her race gone (more or less, anyhow; save the Doctor, but for a variety of reasons he ought not to know she was still around) and the Academy and the Supreme Council of Gallifrey both dissolved, Mary was very much left to her own devices. and her own devices, such as they were... well. Of course she was not called upon to be an intergallactic time-travelling do-gooder anymore. And her good marks and reputation at the Academy (“Ice Maiden,” in retrospect, was a more flattering title than her jealous schoolmates had intended it to be) would get her nowhere anymore. And so, after testing out her new means of travel and evaluation, she set out to do exactly what she wanted for a change.

And what she wanted, as it happened, was simple: a family.

The first was a young boy with a rotten temper. An only child whom the sonic tape measure dubbed “quite spoiled and quick to anger, doesn’t wash his hands before supper” and whose parents were too weary to chase him down by the end of the day. Well, by the time Mary took her leave, he’d given all his old toys to the needy and would sooner choke than show himself in the dining room with soiled hands. An upstanding boy in the end. But this was no family for Mary. The boy’s mother decidedly disliked her, and was too reminiscent of jealous schoolmates. 

But just as importantly, this first trip (mission, she’d called it at first, before she realised that such a label was much too presumptuous) was the occasion on which she’d met Bert. A silly jack-of-whatever-trade-played-on-his-whim-of-the-moment with a winning smile happened to ask to draw her portrait at the park on her day off. He did such a fine job of it that in return she offered to take him to a castle he’d drawn which he had never seen, but had copied from a photograph. At first he balked, saying that he couldn’t go on such a long trip just now. But Mary told him not to be silly, because it wasn’t far at all -- the chalk drawing was right in front of them, was it not?

She considered the drawing for a moment. Seeing the baffled expression on the young man’s face, she winked at him. And then, leaning in to have a better look at it, she blinked. And then, considering how to bend the dimensional continuum _just so,_ blinked again. And finally, taking his hand, she jumped. And there they were, of an afternoon.

She might have taken him with her, almost. Not just to the castle, but to _everywhere,_ for the rest of forever. But she knew enough to know that _her_ forever was much longer than everybody else’s. It was better not to become attached if she didn’t mean to stay. In the end, she left him behind. She didn’t even say goodbye when the wind took her away.

The second family was a pair of weedy Swedish sisters.Their measurements read “flighty and often moody” and “loud and often cries,” both ending with “quarrels with her sister.”  They were not such quick studies as the first had been, but the breakthrough came when Mary took them both flying. She made it so that Anges, the elder, could only go up, and Ingrid, the younger, could only go down -- so in the end, the girls had to hold hands to get where they were going. A most successful exercise.

Five trips later, as it happened, she found herself right back where she’d begun. Jane and Michael Banks, her charges were called (and another two on the way, according to the Artron vessel with the TARDIS matrix within, which had disguised itself as an umbrella on this particular occasion).  "Rather inclined to giggle, doesn't put things away," and “extremely stubborn and suspicious,” respectively.

And that, as it turned out, was _the family_. There was something all too remarkable about them, every one. Not just the children, but the mother who was weary and sad and looking for her place in the world; the father who had retreated too far into himself to be who he wanted to be. And Bert was there, too, a couple of short blocks away, with his drawings and a smile. 

He asked to go with her, that time. And she sadly shook her head. Leaving the Banks family was the most difficult thing her work had ever asked of her. Her TARDIS told her he ought not to, the cheeky, wordy thing (she would have to duct tape his mouth shut if he took this form again), but there was much that they had to do in her absence.

And she in theirs, as it turned out. Another family in need -- or two, or four.

And then the wind did a remarkable thing.

It brought her back.

“You needn’t have worried,” she said, cool as you please, setting foot lightly down on the front step of the familiar house on Cherry Tree lane once more. But she said it as much to herself as to her TARDIS.

And stepped back into the home that, in spite of herself, she wished so dearly could be her own.


End file.
